The Meta-Meadow
by Lee Kyle
Summary: Bella gets to choose who she will be. Such freedom makes Edward happy. Perhaps others are not so glad.
1. Chapter 1

**The Meta-Meadow**

Bella hiked into a popsicle-flower field, damp greens grating against her school's dusty, Southwest reality. It had to be a dream. A vision of innocent Forks life. But she had never been to this place.

An older teenage boy appeared on the clearing's opposite side: dark, brooding, handsome, frightening. Bella knew him. Or _would_ know him: lover, stalker, mater, deathless. Her future. Bella was only fourteen, but there was no doubt. This man would consume her.

"I'm Edward," the boy-man said as he approached. "This is our place, Bella. The gods are giving you an hour. Before you choose me, you get to choose your self. Who are you going to be?"

"This seems pretty good," Bella noted. "Here with you."

"I agree," Edward affirmed. "But there is war in the heavens. Most of the goddesses would strip you away from you, remake you in their image. Even the goddess who made you is powerless to stop it."

"I don't understand," Bella replied, now just feet from her future love.

"In two years we will meet in Forks," Edward explained. "We will fall in love. Eventually we will get married and have a daughter. You will join me in the vampire state, against my will. We will live together forever, feeding on animals and maximizing all joys undead creatures are able to experience."

"Don't be ridiculous. There's no such thing as vampires. I'm just dreaming."

Edward shook his head. "It's not a dream, Bella. It's a meta-narrative nexus. Most of the goddesses don't care about you, about what you actually want for yourself. They never give you a choice. There's at least one, though, who _does_ care, who is giving you a chance right now to decide what happens to you."

"You're not making sense."

Edward reached out, stroked Bella's cheek. She leaned into the caress, drinking the affection, thirsting for more. How did she know him? Why did she love him? What could she do to get him to get closer?

"You will become an inspiration," Edward said. "Millions of women will make you the personification of their romantic desires. But they won't stop there. They will claim you and possess you and make you the embodiment of personal fantasy. They will strip you of your identity and replace you with themselves. You will become a cypher, a doll, a surrogate. You will cease to exist as an independent person. You will be whatever each goddess decides you will be."

"That doesn't help," Bella protested.

"OK," Edward replied, removing his hand and beginning to pace about the meadow. "Imagine the story of our lives getting rewritten. I'm not a vampire. There are no vampires. And you're not you anymore, either. You're a high school nobody longing for the brilliant soccer star. I'm a medieval knight who's claimed you as my prize. You're a kindergarten teacher and I'm raising my little sister, a student in your class. We're lost souls bonding in a backyard treehouse. Don't you see? The goddesses eliminate us and replace us with other people who have the same names and physical appearances. But you and me, Bella, the people we actually are – we cease to exist."

Bella just shook her head.

"There's all these women who want to write their own romance novels," Edward said. "But if they just write their own story and post it on fiction press, they know no one will read it. So they name the characters after us, maybe give them the same physical appearances, and call it Twilight fanfiction. Then thousands of women read the story, even though it isn't really Twilight fanfiction at all. Our names and bodies have been hijacked to obtain readership. We are being violated, Bella. Don't you understand? We are not what we are."

"And you're saying that today I'm being given a choice. Do I want to become a cypher, a surrogate in an original novel that really has nothing to do with me or the Twilight universe?"

"Exactly. Do you want this, Bella? Do you want your personal identity raped and replaced by a goddess who wants to use you as cover for an original story that would never get read unless disguised as fanfiction?"

Bella demurred. "I'm not sure. I want us to go on being us, certainly. Alternate Universes? All Human stories? Please. How lame can you get? Yet what harm does raping me really do? It's not like I really know about it. I mean, isn't this conversation an out-of-character experience, committing the very offense you seem to be objecting against? And it's not like I'll remember it, anyway. Who cares if my fans gut me and remake me in their own image?"

"Well, that's the point," Edward concluded. "Do _you_ care, Bella? Do you care?"


	2. Chapter 2

**More Meta**

"I think I understand," Bella concluded. "What you're saying is that women are making me into a cypher, and that I must decide whether or not I'm OK with being treated in this way."

"Cypher?" Edward queried, puzzled. "You know you've always been smarter than me, even if I _have_ lived for a hundred years. It's not like attending high school over and over again actually increases a person's intelligence."

"Cypher," Bella said. "A person or thing of no value or importance; a non-entity. To treat me like a cypher is to assert than I am not really a character at all. I'm just a stuffed shirt, a placeholder, an empty shell into which the reader can substitute herself. And the _reason_ the reader can replace me with herself so easily is because there's nothing 'here' for the reader to displace – I have no substance of my own to get in the way."

Edward shook his head, picked some flowers, and stuck them in Bella's hair. "You may not be the deepest fictional character of our generation, Bella, but it's too much to call you a cypher. Even if you do start out as something of a Mary Sue, your choices repeatedly drive the plot of our life. Plus you display a dark attraction to the vampire world, along with a curious indifference to the feeding activities of our vampire 'friends.' Perhaps this makes you callous, Bella. It hardly makes you shallow."

"Yet you're saying people who supposedly love me can't help turning me into a cypher," Bella replied, sitting up. "Whatever depth does exist in me gets replaced with a ditzy, grunting body interested in nothing but phones, fashion, and fornication. That means even if I'm not a cypher, I'm shallow enough to get turned into a cypher. I am capable of being gutted, emptied, hollowed, vacuumed."

Edward stroked her hair, tried to kiss her. "I don't know," he replied. "The impression I get is that you only love me because I am a vampire. If I were not a vampire, you would love some other guy, whatever guy in town _is_ a vampire. If this sort of conditional love is really a core element of who you are, I don't see how anyone can call you a cypher. You are not an empty shell. You are Bella."

"But I am treated as a shell."

"You don't have to like it. You don't have to accept it. That's what this is all about. You're being given a chance to speak up for yourself, to say that you are _not_ a cypher, that you resent being turned _into_ a cypher, that the gods do not have a right to remake you in their image. How about it, Bella? Who are you? Who do you want to be?"

"Well, even if I am shallow, I'd like to think I'm _capable_ of change. Shouldn't the gods do me that much courtesy? Yes, they could turn my story into a mindless, meaningless pulp romance. But couldn't they also go in the opposite direction? Couldn't they seize upon what deep places _do_ exist in me, and see how deep those places go? And if they discover the worst – that I have no real depth – could they not find out if I am at least _capable_ of becoming deep? Can Bella Swan change, grow, expand, _something_? Isn't such change what a great story is all about?

"So no," Bella concluded. "I am not a cypher. My fans may not turn me into a cypher. I make it official: no more All Human stories, no more Alternate Universe stories. I love vampires. I _am_ a vampire. You do not get to change me into you."


End file.
